Godkiller (Hannah Kaner)

Godkiller
The Fallen Gods series, Book 1
Hannah Kaner
HarperVoyager
Fiction, Fantasy
*** (Okay)

DESCRIPTION: In a world where gods are birthed by the desires and fears of humans, competition for offerings and worship can lead to bloody massacres and even war - which is why the new king of Middren, young Arren, banished them from his lands. Now, his knights stamp out shrines and mercilessly root out fledgling worshipers, while mercenary "godkillers" hunt down the deities themselves with weapons of briddite that harm immortals as mere metal cannot. It may seem harsh, but it's the only way to prevent another bloody war like the one that nearly destroyed Middren and has claimed more than one of its neighboring lands.
Kissen lost her family and a leg to fanatical worshipers of a fire god when she was but a girl, and has dedicated her life to destroying deities wherever she finds them. But when Inara, a sheltered daughter of a local noblewoman, comes to her for help, Kissen feels torn. The girl has somehow become bound to Skedi, a little god of white lies, though neither recalls how it happened. Killing the god will kill the girl, but letting it live goes against everything Kissen believes in, everything she's dedicated her life to as a godkiller. Then Inara's home is burned to the ground, her family murdered, and Kissen realizes there's something much larger and more dangerous going on than just one god-bound girl.
Elo was once Arren's best friend and most loyal knight, until their final battle against the god of war - the one that cemented Arren's rule, but left Elo devastated. Now a humble baker, he tries to forget his old friend and the past... until Arren himself turns up on his doorstep. In that final battle, the king took a blow to the heart that would have been fatal, save for the intervention of a fire goddess... but the flame she placed in his breast is fading. Arren can't seek a new miracle without revealing his greatest secret, so he begs Elo to undertake one last quest in his name.
There is only one place in Middren where answers might be found: Blenraden, the abandoned citadel where the final blow of Arren's war was struck. Here, the last of the kingdom's wild gods endure, the only deities with the strength to grant the favors needed by Kissen, Inara, and Elo - gods whose very nature makes them dangerous. But the gods may be the least of the dangers they face, in a land teetering on the brink of civil war under Arren's iron fist.

REVIEW: It seemed like a decent idea, and I remember hearing good things about Godkiller when it came out, so when I chanced upon a free-to-me copy I snapped it up. Unfortunately, this is another case where hype exceeded experience.
Things start on a promising, if dark, note, as young Kissen and her family are being hauled away by neighbors who have turned away from the beneficial ocean god of their island home in favor of the promises of wealth and glory made by a fire god... a fire god who demands human sacrifice. Scarred and godmarked by the experience, it makes for a great origin story for our future godkiller. But the rest of the book somehow lacks the spark (no pun intended) of that first chapter. The world of Middren feels weirdly flattened and hard to believe in: this is a kingdom that was nearly razed to its foundations when the old queen fell in with a particularly violent cult, in a world where gods regularly turn cultish and violent and throw mortal lives away in their own petty struggles, all within memory of most people alive (and actively ongoing beyond Middren's borders, so one doesn't even need a history lesson to know this)... yet an apparently large percentage of people keep running back to gods and resent being told that maybe there's a reason to be cautious about where and how one spends one's faith. The core characters become hard to believe in, as well, sometimes behaving irrationally given their history and situations, with little to no chemistry between them. So many of the events that formed them and their relationships are in the rear view mirror that the book keeps looking back over its shoulder, in a way that made me wonder if maybe Kaner should've just written the prequel instead. Kissen goes from being understandably embittered to just plain unlikable and crude for the sake of being crude. Elo's pining for the best friend (clearly more than just a friend to him, though that's brushed aside in manufactured sexual tension with Kissen, because apparently that trope must be shoehorned in every story even if it makes no sense for the characters involved) and the life he walked away from almost trails into comedy territory it gets so repetitive. Speaking of repetition, more than one plot point and event and emotional beat is repeated multiple times, apparently because I, as the reader, was not expected to remember things from just the previous chapter (or previous repetitions), enough that it really started grating on me. All of this kicked me out of the tale enough for me to realize that I've seen many of the key concepts at play here in other stories that I found more immersive, such as Terry Pratchett's Small Gods or Charles Edward Pogue's book and film Dragonheart; even the oft-repeated imagery of King Arren bearing the severed stag head of the war god, symbol of his victory and rule, put me in mind of the Miyazaki animated film Princess Mononoke. The climax had some nice moments, but it lost a fair bit of impact for me as I had long since stopped caring about the world and only had minimal concern about the fates of the characters involved. It all serves to set up a sequel, but I don't expect I'll follow up on that.
Godkiller had some nice ideas and lots of potential, with a few standout moments that worked. It also tended to avoid easy wins; people pay for mistakes and for victories, sometimes for the rest of their lives. There's some decent exploration of the dangers of fanaticism and how even the smallest and most seemingly-benign faiths can metastasize into something deadly and monstrous, twisting people into disposable tools of someone (or something) else's agenda. But my lack of engagement with the world and characters just kept kicking me out, and I kept thinking instead of how I'd seen similar ideas explored more successfully elsewhere.

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